China's days as workhouse of the world could be numbered

China faces diminishing work force China will face a shortage of workers
unless it revises its one-child policy, experts said, after statistics
showed the first fall in the proportion of working-age adults in a decade.

China's economic miracle has been powered by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of workersPhoto: EPA

The proportion of Chinese people aged between 15 and 64 dropped 0.1 percentage points to 74.4 per cent in 2011, the National Bureau of Statistics reported, adding that while it was a "small shift", there is "a need to place much importance on the labour issue".

China's economic miracle has been powered by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of workers. But demographers have warned that the imposition of the one-child policy at the end of the 1970s will leave China with a shrinking work force.

The latest statistics showed the number of Chinese over-60s reaching 185 million, or 13.7 per cent.

"In ten years time, there will be a gap of 10 million workers between the people retiring and new workers starting," said Liang Zhongtang, a sociologist and former consultant to the national expert committee on family planning.

"These figures are the first sign of the decline of the working population. In the 1950s there were 20 million newborns a year, in the 1960s there were 24 million. But by the 1990s the number had fallen below 20 million".

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"In fact, we can already see there is a labour shortage among low cost workers, although the government has chosen to ignore it and labour it as a change in the structure of the economy. And the thing about China is that it cannot rely on immigration like other countries," he said.

Surveys have shown that China could have almost a third of its population over the age of 60 by 2040.